Smart phones didn't start with those features.
...he said, oldly.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Me, in Rome with my Blackberry on Verizon Wireless: “oh fuck, nothing works”
Pre travel sims, we had multi dollar per megabyte roaming fees. Smart phones were only any good when you could find a McDonald's to steal some wifi from.
Smartphones with WiFi came waaaaay later!
You must be very young, I'm not trying to start shit. Auto-translation became a semi-functional feature around a decade plus after smart phones existed. At first we just had very basic apps. Look funny and drink beer or see the stars from a GPS location on your phone.
It’s still not perfect but we’re getting there. Your assumption that apps magically existed and worked is adorable. Progress takes time.
I'm Gen Z lol
Oh lol I just remembered the first smartphone was invented in like 2007 (as in, actual mass market product, not just prototypes), I had my first in 2015, so probably warped worldview lol. Like my parent were still using flip phones in early 2010s and this was also around the time when I first had internet access (didn't have internet in my neighborhood in my previous country).
I always forget and thought smartphones were invented in like 2013 or something, since that's the first time I see one, my aunt had one that I just played with during family gatherings. Pretty sure I remember Google Translate to be an app already.
But I mean like smartphones paved the way for these tools to exist ubiquitiously, not as in these tools immediately existed upon the invention of smartphones, know what I sayin'?
If you're going to end your sentences with "lol" you don't also need to say that you're Gen Z. One or the other will do. 😏
I agree your original point stands, regardless of the timescales involved.
The invention of the smart phone did make international travel less intimidating, even if some of the functions took a while to appear.
end your sentences with "lol" you don't also need to say that you're Gen Z.
I am pretty sure we lol-ed a lot already before the majority of Gen-Z was even born...
Yes, but we didn't integrate it into our sentences lol
Someone made a joke and we answered "lol"
It's more like an atmosphere indicator because of the lack of facial expressions in a face-to-face conversation. Without the "lol" feel so... serious for some reason
:P
Nah. Lol has been part of the "texting based dictionary" for a good minute, it's like putting "haha". I'm near 30 and this definitely predates gen-x
I first encountered and used it in the online forums during the late 90's and early 00s.
Has been part of sentences back then and I still use it like that.
"lol" primarily as standalone reply sounds like something from an later messenger-centric era.
Are you a Millenial by any chance?
Are you a Millenial by any chance?
Sí, señor. If you like, I can give you my ICQ number.
LOL.
I once missed a call from my mother on my cell phone because it was getting late...
I got in trouble due to the fact I didn't call her back.
The phone didn't have caller ID on it.. so I had no idea who had called. All it said one 1 missed call.
Cell phone tech has definitely been a process.
I got in trouble once because there was a small earthquake in Brooklyn that made everyone call each other so it clogged up the lines, this was before 5g so the congestion problems were way worse.
Mom at first thought I broke her phone lol.
Your comment reminded me of that incident lol
So every time after that, I'd bring up that incident when ever my parents falsely accuse of doing something wrong
Haha that's a great excuse...
But mom! Earthquake!!!
That's so in line with the dog ate my homework, plausible but not probable.
Love it. Haha
Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you'd call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.
The original iPhone did not have an app store.
Smartphones are much older than that. Symbian Series 60 had a substantial install base long before the iPhone. The N-Gage was a smart phone, for example, so we're not just talking high end stuff.
Never heard of it before (or maybe I did but forgot it) so I just looked it up, didn't they only have like 6% marketshare in the US? I mean that's less than amount of people who use adblockers, and I never met someone irl who uses an adblocker. My point being, its very rare and I never seen one.
I was in China before 2010, never heard of it as a kid. My dad had some motorola feature phone thingy.
I've no idea what market penetration was like on a different continent twenty years ago 😂
Many Nokia phones ran Symbian S60 (I specify because there was a number of Symbian OSes. I've never quite pinned down why). Not just Nokia, but in their day Nokia were THE phone company.
I went from a Nokia N90 to an iPhone. The iPhone had fewer features at the time (the app store came later, it couldn't record video - let alone edit it, etc.). The thing was that the features it did have were so much more user friendly. It was night and day.
Smartphones are surprisingly old although I doubt more than a tiny handful of their users actually knew what they were capable of back in the day. I had my N-Gage setup with a web browser, MSN Messenger client (the IM service of choice in the UK at the time), Xvid video player, Ogg Vorbis audio, office software, and quite a few games too (both Java and native). My N90 could use all the same software when I moved to it a few years later.
Americans for a time were made fun of for their terrible cellphones, so yeah
The iPhone was released in 2007, and the Google Translate app for iOS and Android had the feature to point the phone’s camera at text to auto-translate it around 2010.
Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.
Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can't transcribe a language you don't understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn't have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.
That's assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.
The early smartphone era was wild. Motorola made the very first phone with iTunes on it for example
Not smartphone, but my dad's Motorola phone that looked like this: (pre 2010s very old)
Had some weird ninja turtle game on it.
Cool Game I thought, but parents got mad that it automaticaly billed the phone company... not my fault, I'm the younger sibling so I think I mostly got away with it and my older brother was the one that got the most trouble, he tricked me to press the download button.
Smartphones made an incredible change. We used to plan trips months or even years in advance. Mailing to foreign embassies for visas, gathering maps, buying travelor's cheques, making reservations by mail, researching by borrowing books from the library - all took a lot of time and effort.
I find this the weirdest part of reading old travel accounts, like from the 16th century or something. When travel really was a completely different beast. They never talk about getting lost or language barriers as being the big problems. The biggest problem is always getting sick or accidents.
And looking at my own life and traveling before smart or even mobile phones existed. I feel exactly the same. I always knew where I had to go, even if I had to search for it. And I was always able to get around and buy things without speaking a word. Just gestures and an attempt at learning a few simple words.
But I always had something to fall back on. A landline. A travel agency. A random person that shared a language. I always was curious how travel went before those things existed. And now to see a next generation being curious about how travel was before another thing to fall back on.
The thing to fall back on just gets more and more competent. From having to use a post system that took weeks to get an answer back. To being able to call anyone anywhere anytime. I think every step has made travel easier, less intimidating, and cheaper.
Travelling has changed a lot.
It's become way more accessible. Not a lot of people used to travel for leisure. But now it seems almost everyone except the poorest do it. There are a lot more businesses that cater to tourists in every city/town nowadays.
Smartphones have taken a lot of fun out of it too though. There's almost no challenge to it anymore and thus less a sense of adventure. At least for me.
And everyone is doing selfies and streaming the landscape instead of watching itself. It‘s like being in a country just for the audience.
That was already visible with digital pocket cameras around late 90ies. Cost of photgraphy went to zero.
Not just international travel but travel in general.
And if it is only going to the next big town by bike, knowing that you could phone someone and just tell him exactly where you are.
Oh, man, you have no idea how much fun it was to get lost in a city where you couldn’t speak the language or read the signs.
I had fun being (figuratively) feeling lost in school and didn't speak English, and the American-Born Chinese classmates barely spoke Cantonese and I kinda feel like they felt annoyed that they had to translate for me (just my perception of what they thought of me... maybe it's just me being introverted). And I'm just in this classroom... and this teacher is talking... and idk what the fuck is happening... I'm halfway cross the world from my spawnpoint and like... everything is giberish.
I was 2010 and I don't think teachers had Google Translate yet.
So yea I know the "fun" xD.
I also remember just exploring NYC via traveling using the subway system... like we'd visit various places... just randomly decide to go to Bronx one time, to Queens, Flushing, go to Coney Island Beach, just going to the F and Q trains just like go sightseeing lol, like look outside the window of the train (for the segments its abobe ground), like this is a city with so many people, but its only me and my mother in this little bubble because we barely spoke English for the first few years, and they didn't have smartphones all this time... eventually I did learn English and so I kinda became my parent's go-to translator lol.
Such memorable times, Iiked that version of my mother... I think she just got so fed up with me when I got older, I got less adorable and more annoying... 🙃
One of my most memorable moments were at Urumqi 2006. A town in China were me as a Westener felt absolutely alien. Street and shop signs were in Chinese letters, Russian letters and Islamic letters. No chance to get an idea.
And over there my Visa debit card stopped working at the ATM‘s. I quickly ran out of money. And my visa needed an extension. And I needed money to get it and my passport back. And I had just a single box of salty crackers left. But I got out of the muddle ;)
People are talking about how smartphones didn’t have those features at first, but I just carried around a 2 language dictionary when I was traveling before cellphones were a thing. I’m not sure if they’re exactly the same everywhere, but I also always found reading an atlas/map to transfer pretty easily from one country to another (across North America and Europe, so there could be much greater variation in the world than I saw).
It sounds harder and it was, but only a little. You already knew how to read maps and at least you didn’t have to worry about a battery.
As someone who traveled extensively before and after, it's a huge difference. I traveled Europe for 6 months with no mobile phone whatsoever. Only paper maps and pay phones and no hotel reservations. All my money was in travelers cheques. That was a proper adventure. Now there's essentially nothing that can go wrong.
Yeah, I miss the adventure part of learning a new city with just a handful of polite words to get you by. I've also noticed that pretty much everywhere I go there are plenty of people who speak English so less of a reason to learn another language. I still enjoy finding my way around a new city without a map though, and that is easy to keep doing, you just don't pull out your phone to look at the map.
I still enjoy finding my way around a new city without a map though
Heck this is a blast even at home. If I'm given an address in a small town it's pretty fun to just drive around and try to find the address without looking it up
There is probably truth to what you say but I will point out that people used to get pocket guides to carry around that explained how things worked in the target country and provided basic phrases for ordering in restaurants, saying thank you, and such.